mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Nick Bailey <address@hidden>]

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Yes, Javier, I was joking. I think portability is good, both 
amongst operating systems and languages. You are quite right 
in what you say.

In the Centre for Music Technology laboratory at Glasgow 
University, I have removed Windows completely from all the 
machines except one old PC in case we get sent some files we 
otherwise cannot read. We run various flavours of Unix, 
mostly Linux. While there are more jobs for graduates with MS 
than Linux, the "best" jobs (the ones the students mostly 
want) see Linux experience as a huge advantage. Working in a 
bank maintaining boring accounts systems see Microsoft as an 
advantage. I met an old research assistant the other day who 
works for a multinational consumer electronics company on 
digitial video products: most of their development is done 
with Linux. The exciting animation jobs in the US in the 
holywood studios are all SGI/Solaris/Linux-based. And look at 
the Film Gimp web page (http://filmgimp.sourceforge.net/)!

However, I always give out copies of gcc to first-year 
students on a cygwin CD, with a copy of coursenotes. Perhaps 
I should distribute TeXmacs for Windows too, and Scilab, 
and.... If there are any other academics listening, and we 
all did the same, I think there would be a huge benefit for 
everyone. But still all my colleagues (I work in Electronic 
Engineering; our computer scientists are a little more 
enlightened) use Visual C++, Matlab, Word/Powerpoint... Now 
whose fault is it the university pays so much for software 
every year? Us or the students? If the whole department 
dropped the use of Microsoft Office, we could pay for a 
full-time developer to work on TeXmacs, and already the 
equations look better! We could even pay him/her to help with 
the Windows port 8)

Nick/

On Tuesday 05 Nov 2002 8:16 am, you wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Nov 2002 18:22:04 +0000
>
> Nick Bailey <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I think we should not support Windows. It is a waste of
> > time and only of benefit for marketting purposes. The
> > amount of time it takes to work around bugs in Windows
> > systems wastes the time of the most expert programmers.
> >
> > 8)
>
> I wish somebody prepare a Windows version. I think you are
> joking but I don't. I use Linux mainly but my partners and
> my students (almost everyboy I work with) use Windows as
> OS. I'd like that they use Texmacs because it's a great
> piece of software and it would be easier to exchange files.
> And if they began to use some software from linux, someday
> they would migrate from Windows to Linux ;-)  I think that
> the best politics is to let everyboy to use the OS they
> like. The most important is the software you use. For
> example, one strong point of Openoffice is that is
> multiplatform.
>
> Somedays ago, some people told to the list that they had
> run Texmacs on Windows boxes. I have no knowledge about
> compiling programs, etc. so I don't feel ready to compile
> texmacs on Windows myself. I hope that somebody will
> prepare a Windows version (easy to install) to download.
>
> TIA,
>
> Javier

- -- 
Dr Nick Bailey <address@hidden>
Centre for Music Technology (http://cmt.gla.ac.uk)
Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering 
(http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/)
The University of Glasgow (http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk)

Find my public key at http://www.keyserver.net
Fingerprint: 9ED7 6063 C1F7 A0FB 2F7E D2F6 168F A41A 6527 CE44
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